Road Trips

Road trips are strange things. Time ceases having normal meaning and soon becomes measured by many other things. I recently took a road trip. My total driving time was 23 hours. I drank three thermoses of coffee, one incredibly nasty green apple Slurpee, and two liters of water. I flew to Indianapolis to pick up this car. It is standard and so besides a road trip, I was relearning how to drive a manual. I stalled out four times. I stayed in one hotel. I bought one large pizza and ate three quarters of it. I ate two pb&js, a sandwich bags worth of carrot sticks, innumerable sesame sticks, snickers, milky way, pecans, chocolate chips, chocolate covered coffee beans, and banana bread cooked by my loving sister.
Gas prices, as you know, are quite high. Therefore the number of times I stopped to get gas is important. I stopped 4 times for gas. Three of those times my tank was at about half, but they coincided with my bathroom breaks and Nebraska and Wyoming are not known for numerous towns.
Many of the files I put on my new mp3 player wouldn't play so mostly I listened to Disney songs and country music, as there are always country stations in any given desolate spot. I tried counting the number of cars on a train. I got up to about 72 and had to pass a truck so I lost track.
Besides the way you measure time, the other strange thing is the friends you make along the way. When you travel such long distances you play the passing game with several other vehicles. You also might follow behind someone for hours then when they turn off it feels a little bit sad as they were a companion through the lonely miles. As nice as it is playing passing tag, there are those drivers that you want to leave far behind or have them leave you behind. There was this one car who just couldn't wait the 15 sec it would take for me to pass this semi so they whipped over into the right lane and squeezed in between me and the semi just as I was coming up on it.
When I arrived home after driving for 12 hours and oddly took only two breaks. I was so time disoriented that I was under the illusion that I had stopped three times. I was so used to speeding along at 80mph that I had to lay down when I got home because I almost fell over when standing up.
I love road trips. They are so much fun.